The rapid development in the capabilities of wireless communication apparatuses means that it is now possible to carry out video communications in real time on the basis of mobile terminals with a satisfactory level of quality.
In order to maintain reasonable bitrate requirements for the transmission of these streams on network infrastructures, these video streams are generally compression encoded and therefore require decoding by the receiver of these streams. This decoding generally constitutes, among other elements, an operation that is demanding in terms of computation resources and hence power consumption.
Techniques have been proposed to reduce the power consumption of a terminal that needs to perform stream decoding. Notably, the company Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd has proposed, during MPEG—Motion Picture Experts Group—standardization meetings in Geneva in April 2012 and Stockholm in July 2012, a solution based on what is known as the DVFS “Dynamic Voltage Frequency Scaling” technique, a technique that is implemented in numerous computation chips. DVFS involves reducing the clock frequency of the chip by decreasing the voltage that is applied thereto; the consumption of this chip is then reduced. Conventionally, this decrease in the voltage is triggered in response to the finding, in view of the recent images transmitted in the received stream, that the chip has a power margin for carrying out decoding of this stream and that it is therefore possible to decrease its computation power without affecting the correct execution of the decoding. Moreover, the company Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd proposes improving this method by transmitting to the stream receiver one or more metadata providing an indication of the complexity of decoding of the stream, this indication allowing the apparatus receiving the stream to better adjust the power of the chip used for decoding this stream.
This technique can nevertheless prove inadequate in certain situations, so much so that communication can be suddenly interrupted because the apparatus performing the decoding has exhausted its power reserves.